The first time she saw the boy across the classroom, Ah Lee knew she was in love because she tasted durian on her tongue. That was what happened–no poetry about it. She looked at a human boy one day and the creamy rank richness of durian filled her mouth. For a moment the ghost of its stench staggered on the edge of her teeth, and then it vanished.

She had not tasted fruit since before the baby came. Since before she was dead.

So, for Christmas, Pops and Mo got us a really exciting present—a chicken coop for our backyard! Here’s a picture of the boys putting it together:

And here it is, all set up and waiting for hens:

For the past few weeks I’ve been chewing over the merits of various chicken breeds (Orpington? Ameraucauna? Marans?) but have finally settled on the Welsummer, mostly because this is one of the few breeds where males and females can be reliably differentiated as chicks. Oakland doesn’t allow roosters, so if we went with the other breeds we’d have to either buy adult birds, or face the probability that one or more of the chickens we’d raised up from little scraps of fluff—a bird that had bonded to us, and that we’d treated as a pet—would have to be sold off for slaughter. I think that would be rough on me, and the boys. By going with Welsummer chicks, we get to spare ourselves that trauma: and the Welsummer has a reputation as a good-tempered, hardy backyard bird.

So I’ve been e-mailing back and forth with Just Struttin Farm in Marin; they have Welsummers hatching soon, and if we’re lucky we’ll be able to take home three baby chicks in a couple of weeks. It’ll be so exciting, and a great learning experience for the boys. So, watch this space for adorable fluffy chicks, coming soon!

Well, I managed to bork myself with my cowgirl approach to software upgrades. I was trying to update the version of PHP that this blog runs on, and I managed to completely blow away all the HTML/CSS customization I’d done.

So it’s gonna look like this for a while, until I get the time to try and muck it with it again.